High School Week One Reflection

My first week in the high school only consisted of two days, but they were powerful days! My biggest take away from these two days was the teachers relationship with her students, peers, and the administration. This teacher had a truly amazing classroom community built with her students. The community spread to the hall, the lunchroom, and even included students that were not in any of her classes. I was amazed at just how much of a connection was forged with the students. It was awesome to see a big part of my teaching philosophy at play within another teacher's classroom. It gave me hope that it is possible to achieve and maintain in a high school setting.


Another big take away for me was the senior project. I did not have to complete a senior project in my final year of high school, so I did not fully understand the depth of the projects. I had a few brief encounters with them through cousins, but basically just heard the ranting and anxiety around them. It was very enlightening to sit through several Senior Skills class in which students were walked through a few steps and the importance of this piece. I left this week with a new view on senior projects and a better understanding of what this project is exactly.


I am looking forward to the next few weeks of being in a high school environment. Also, I am looking forward to seeing how senior classes are taught and managed. I have to admit that my senior year was one in which I began the senioritis stretch in October. I was never fully engaged or cooperative (in retrospect, this is a huge regret for me!) and it is a huge relief to me that there are senior students who are. I am excited to also be a part of such a strong and comfortable classroom community--this is absolute fuel for my teacher fire!

Week Four Reflection

This week proved to be extremely difficult. With such a profound loss over the weekend I wasn’t entirely sure how things would work out in the world of teaching and observations. Walking on campus for the first time, and walking into the middle school proved to be extremely difficult for me. For the first time over the last month of being in a middle school I wasn’t excited on my drive in. However, being around those kids was uplifting. They made me laugh, they amazed me, and they made me proud. My teaching experience was positive and reinforced my need to teach.

This week we taught our debate lesson on All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury. The first day of debate went well. The students had never covered debate before and were coming off of Socratic Seminars. For the first few minutes of the actual debate the students were leaning more towards a seminar type discussion. However, with a little probing and modeling the students were easily back on the track of a debate. We provided the students with positive feedback and coaching throughout and I really feel it made a huge difference in their perception of the topic of debate.

The very next day the students held the debate and it was truly a work of art for me to see. Students were actively engaged and were following debate rules and guidelines perfectly. I have to say from a teacher candidate standpoint that it was incredible to see such huge improvement overnight. I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment and pride for our lesson, but most importantly for the students. Things went mostly as planned except that we were not able to get to our second debate question. At first I thought this was a bad thing, but after further thought I realized it is much better to have a lively and passionate debate on one question than a mediocre and lack luster discussion on two questions. I am sure I will run into this multiple times in my teacher career and I am sure it will take practice to learn when to appropriately end one question and move on to the next. As for this lesson as a whole I am happy with the turnout and look forward to having future debates!

The Jennifer Cook Project

This project is a way to allow myself, as well as Jennifer Tomich and Kayla Sawyer, to heal through the process of writing. Dr. Cook said it best: "First, I write to heal. The world usually hurts in one way or another and the best way I know how to figure out the whys and hows". This project is a way for all that were touched by this remarkable person to heal. This project follows Dr. Cook's philosophy of working together as a team, a community, to create something beautiful! Our plan is to take these memories/snapshots/writings and compile them into a book to give to her wife and family, but also to give to her RIC family so that we can all keep her beautiful light shining bright.

Week Three Reflection

This week in the middle school students created their foldables for their research project on a famous American. I had never seen foldables done for a paper, as opposed to a traditional outline. It was truly amazing to see this. It kept students focused on an individual component of the paper (hook/thesis, early life, education etc.) without being overwhelmed by the other components of the paper. I have to be completely honest—I will be utilizing this technique to complete my senior seminar paper. Students seemed to really enjoy them too! Students spent four days developing and tweaking their hooks and thesis’ as a class. Alongside our cooperating teacher we were able to work one on one with the students to revise and rework their hook and thesis statements. I really enjoyed working with the students on their writing. It’s a wonderful feeling to witness students excited about writing, especially a research paper!


My partner and I also began teaching our debate lesson this week. Our first lesson was to read the short story All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury. We took turns reading the story aloud, while the students read on in their books. The students were given a handout that allowed them to take notes, as well as define the vocabulary from the story. After completion of the short story students were asked questions that probed the class in to a great discussion! It was amazing to be the facilitator of this class, and it was fulfilling to see the kids excited and enjoying the lesson. This class period of sixty minutes definitely stoked my teaching fire!! I look forward to finishing the lesson over the next few days.

#RIWP14

RIWP Annual Spring Conference 2014

I really enjoyed Thomas Newkirk’s keynote address. One of the first things he said was “Introduce self and students through telling stories”! This immediately made me draw connections to our Practicum Social Identity assignment. I loved his outlook on the act of storytelling and the narrative. I have not read any of his books, and have added The Art of Slow Reading and The Performance of Self in Student Writing to my summer reading list. Newkirk’s statement on CCSS was amazing and true: “CCSS says we need to promote critical thinking unless it’s about CCSS. If higher level thinking is important than we should do higher level thinking about the common core”! I cannot wait to read his books and figure out his awesomeness on a complete level!! 

The first workshop I attended was the Poetry Speed Dating. I honestly had so much fun! We were introduced to five different poetry prompts and given 8 minutes to complete each one. In a little over an hour I was able to produce five poems that I am pretty proud of. They have all been rewritten in my writer’s notebook to be cherished forever. These activities were so simple and fun, yet produced awesome poetry assignments for students. By having these fun little prompts and a different angle to introduce the topic/assignments I feel it would remove that fear of producing and performing for students. It would show students how they are able to produce a poem about anything. I think it is important to approach certain hot topic units with great care as to not deter students from the introduction of the unit. I know for myself, as a high school student, when I heard poetry I began to shut down and ignore. I obviously later became in tune with it, but that was through my own process of exploration. Maybe had I been introduced through a fun activity, or had a teacher like Mr. L, I would have been more apt to pick it up sooner. I loved this workshop and I can say that I will definitely use these activities with my future students.  

The second workshop I attended was the Micro Memoir session. My first reaction upon learning our assignment was AMAZING, FUN, and COMICS! It was a truly fun activity and I can see how it would get students excited to write a mini memoir. The activity was four random objects placed under numbered boxes in the front of the room. Each participant was given a number and as a whole we were instructed to stare at the revealed object, in complete silence, for three minutes and begin making connections. As an example, my random object was a strand of gold beads, and this was my thought process: gold beads, gold doubloons, Jake and the Neverland Pirates, Dakota singing and dancing, Dakota says “nine” for “again” at the end of her dance/song numbers, as a child I said “yobster” for “lobster”, and Sunday dinners with my dad at Bassett’s Inn. My 250 word micro memoir was about my Sunday dinners with my father. It was amazing and weird to see me pull that memory for my micro memoir from a string of gold Mardi Gras beads. My other huge take away from this session was seeing the instructor model her thought process and what she expected of us as students. I thought this was such a cool activity and I went home and drew my micro memoir as a six panel comic—I drew connections to my seminar on Graphic Memoirs immediately. I cannot wait to do this activity with my future students!!

Middle School Week Two Reflection

This week the students were finishing up their Socratic seminars. We were able to see this done in three classes, with two being AP classes. The coolest part about seeing this done in three classes was that all classes readily participated. The students were engaged and excited. They were completing the seminars in a complete student driven learning environment. The third IP class was given a lot more scaffolding in terms of Costa’s Level of Questioning and guiding with the questions their groups developed. As far as the seminar piece these students still completed the seminar in a student driven manner. The engagement was like nothing I could have ever thought of in my mind. I expected the students to complete the task because they had to, not because they WANTED to!!!! What an amazing thing to witness as a teacher candidate! Seeing this lesson played out, in all honesty, made me yearn for my middle school certification. 

On Friday we were able to attend, along with the sixth grade classes, a presentation done by two Aquatic Veterinarians from Mystic Aquarium. The presentation allowed the students to see the daily activities and encounters while working at an aquarium. Besides the presentation being really fun and informative, I was able to again see excitement and engagement amongst students. This provided more fuel for my middle school fire. My biggest takeaway from this experience was hearing students answer questions and seeing their teachers’ facial expressions. The teachers were proud! Even a few teachers stated that they had not known that information themselves. It was awesome to see how proud these teachers were, but it was humbling to see them admit to their students that they did not know the information even though the student had. In that very moment my thought was “That’s the kind of teacher I want to be”. I want to feel proud of my students for their knowledge and greatness even if it means they look smarter than me, because quite honestly they should be smarter than me at times. The dichotomy of teacher and student should be one that is on equal playing fields with each providing the other with something to learn!

Middle School Week One Reflection

My first week in middle school was amazing! I spent four days with three sixth grade classes.  As I walked to my car on Friday I was immediately looking forward to Monday morning. I was surprised by my time spent in the classroom in that I didn’t expect to enjoy middle school so much. I knew I would enjoy being in a classroom, but I knew that I was a high school girl so what exactly would middle school have to offer me? The answer is a new teaching desire. I LOVED middle school!! These kids were engaged, excited to learn, they were active participators, and they needed their voices to be heard. A large majority of the class did not sink into their seats when the teacher asked them a question—instead excited hands shot up with hopes that it would be their turn to share their thoughts and opinions. These kids were amazing, truly!!

The classes were being taught a lesson on the Greensboro Four, which would finish with a Socratic seminar. The lesson was taught across four classes and began with the students reading an article, followed by watching a short PBS film. The students were being taught to close read the text with highlighting and underlining important facts, circling vocab, and writing in the margins. The students worked through the text together as a class and then broke into two groups to develop ten higher level thinking questions based on Costa’s levels of questioning, which would fuel their Socratic seminar. These students were excited and they had awesome questions. It was exciting to see children actively engaged! From a teacher candidate standpoint, it was also cool to see how the teacher differentiated this lesson among classes. One class was given a slightly different article, and was required to come up with nine questions made up of three level one, three level two, and three level three questions.

Seeing the amount and types of writing these kids did was refreshing. They had awesome writing assignments that I wanted to do: writer’s notebooks, senses poems on the civil rights movements, and six panel comics! I read a lot of their poems and they were amazing writers. Most importantly, they ENJOYED writing. I am so excited for what the next three weeks will bring into my teaching arsenal and into my writerly soul.